


Starting Somewhere

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: Number One Enemy [4]
Category: Doctor Who, Primeval
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-10
Updated: 2011-04-10
Packaged: 2018-03-08 13:52:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3211511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lorraine gets her life – her life, not the life she should have had and lost to Helen Cutter – back on track.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Starting Somewhere

                These words would not be loaded if she spoke them to anyone else. _Do you want to go out for a drink, some time?_ Lorraine smiles slightly, shyly, even though he knows pretty much everything there is to know about her. (She’s trying not to think about the... implications of that.) She knows there isn’t any point in being shy, but she is anyway, because it’s been six whole months of getting used to everything with just the occasional text back and forth and now this chance meeting that almost certainly is just chance, unlike everything else between them. He’s dressed in rugby kit, muddy shirt and shorts with a forming bruise on his cheekbone, and she can see a group of others similarly dressed a little way off; he came over after he waved at her, and she waved back.

 

                Her niece is clinging to her trousers and bouncing up and down, eyeing the strange man talking to her aunt avidly. Somehow, despite Adele  - who really wants to get to the playground _now_ – they’ve made it through the major pleasantries. How are you, how’s work, this is my niece, nice to meet you.

 

                She could go one of two ways now, fall back or press on, and she has to choose.

 

                She says the loaded words, tacking on an excuse, _it would be nice to catch up with you, it’s been too long_.

 

                He smiles, bright and pleased. “Love to,” he says, and hesitates. “Have you still got my number?”

 

                She smiles back – she couldn’t fail to, his smile is more of shock to the system than she thought it could be; she thought she’d built up the memory of it into something too beautiful to be human, but the reality is... _real_ , and it hits harder than any memory – and nods.

 

                “See you,” he says, and then jerks his head back at the players. “I’d better go.”  


                “Yes,” she replies. “See you.”

 

                She doesn’t watch him go because one, that would be more pathetic than she is willing to be, and two, Adele is dragging her along towards the playground and asking a ridiculous number of questions for a seven-year-old.

               

***

 

                Lorraine wonders if the first date is going to be awkward, if you can even call it a first date, because she was apparently practically living with him in the timeline he had before – the one that Helen took away, breaking up two lives just because she needed an experimental subject. She tries not to dress up too much, it’s just drinks, but even she thinks she looks quite good when she goes out to meet him. Blade would probably look stunning in a plastic bag, but he’s normally, smartly dressed, and from a distance he looks assured, certain.

 

                Then she walks up to him and he smiles at her and she can see he’s as nervous as she is, and she smiles back and threads her fingers through his; he wraps his larger hand around hers and squeezes tightly, and yes, this is going to go just fine.

 

***

 

                Blade doesn’t so much introduce her to his friends as she walks in on one of them while he’s in hospital, haranguing him for getting shot, and the rest of them follow along naturally. Since Lorraine was scared for him too, she lets ‘Matt’ get on with it.

 

***

 

                They think they’ve caught Helen, and then she gets away. Blade comes to Lorraine, and they’re angry together; it involves a lot of shouting at someone who isn’t there, eating of Chinese takeaway, and eventually watching some seriously odd arthouse film in which Tilda Swinton plays an artist mother focussed on her art to the exclusion of her children, except for her older daughter, who was a mirror of her sister or possibly her aunt and fated to follow the same path in life. Since Lorraine falls asleep somewhere between the younger son (sister’s illegitimate son?) setting fire to a pile of leaves and sweeping views of the Yorkshire fells, and Blade rests his head on hers and his arm around her waist and he falls asleep too, neither of them have any idea how it ended, let alone how the BBC came to be screening it at two a.m.

 

                Lorraine balances the pros and cons: pros, waking up in Blade’s arms, feeling safe and warm and breathing fast at every hint of skin on skin; cons, remembering that she has lost her chance to call Helen to account, not being able to understand why the first thing in her mind when she wakes up is ‘but what about Eithne’s kettle?’, being sore from sleeping on her sofa.

 

                She’d do it again. If she gets the chance.

 

***

 

                Lorraine’s family make enquiries about Blade. As a matter of habit, Lorraine dodges them, even though this time she doesn’t really want to.

 

***

 

                She takes him to _Much Ado About Nothing_ at the Globe. She’s perfectly well aware that he sticks to books published after 1940 and last went to the theatre to see dire stand-up comedy, but the Globe can bring Shakespeare to life like nothing else. He’s dubious, but he goes along with it, and she gets sit-down seats even though standing in the Pit can be fun, because it’s September and rain is likely enough.

 

                By the end of Act One he’s muttering furious demands to know what happens to Hero and why Benedict hates Beatrice when they could just get together and bitch about everyone else because the sexual tension is driving him _up the wall_ , and she just laughs softly, leans into his arm around her and whispers that he’ll just have to wait and see.

 

                Some pensioner is sufficiently enraged to poke Blade in the middle of the back, distracting him from the drama onstage, which goes about as well as might be expected. Lorraine feels obliged to turn around and apologise.

 

                “He’s just very into it,” she murmurs, and turns back.

 

                “Grumpy bastard,” Blade breathes, bending his head so close to her ear that she can feel his lips warm against the shell of her ear. She chews her lip to stop herself laughing.

 

                This time she gets the poke between the shoulder blades. “These are not the back seats at the cinema!” mutters the pensioner, who reminds her of Lester, only forty years older and more pedantic.

‘

                Lorraine feels Blade go tense, and nudges him with her elbow. “No violence at the theatre,” she instructs him, and Blade makes a small subterranean noise and settles down.

 

***

 

                She knows he remembers almost every detail of his life with the other Lorraine, although the memories are fading slowly. She knows he writes down what happened to help himself remember later, even though his handwriting is illegible and slow – she suspects a form of dyslexia, which would also explain why he’s so slow at getting through books, even though he enjoys reading.

 

                She would be jealous, but, well – that’s the Other Woman taken care of forever, and the bitch isn’t here. Also, she likes to know what he did with her, and he’s never stopped her reading the notebook he writes the stories in, has left it out for her, even. The painstakingly remembered anecdotes he tells are strangely familiar; some of them spark bizarrely vivid mental images. But they never _talk_ about her.

 

                Fine, she’s still jealous. She reckons that she has as much of a right to be possessive as he does.

 

***

 

                It’s after UNIT has to save the world again that he comes to her flat, quick steps in the moment she lets him in, a gun lying on the kitchen island and her shoes still on, and he grabs her, pulls her against him, kisses her so hard he’s stealing her breath; and she’s tired, and she’s been afraid, and she melts into him because he makes her feel safe again.

 

                “I thought you were dead,” he snaps, and kisses her again, his teeth scraping across her lip, drawing blood, the sting and taste of copper enough to wake her from her shock and make her push back, fight him for dominance, and it’s more of an equal fight than she ever thought it would be. He wants her to prove she’s alive.

 

                She can do that.

 

                “If we keep on like this,” he mutters, hands all over her, lips hot on her neck.

 

                “We’re keeping on like this,” Lorraine assures him, and her fingers go to unbutton her shirt as she leans up to kiss the corner of his mouth. His hands tighten on the curve of her hips. “But not before you shut the door.”

 

                The front door is hanging open, a final loose end, loose thread, and impatiently he goes to shut it. Now they’re together, no distractions, no work, no ghosts in the machine, no Helen Cutter, no _nothing_ in their way.

 

                Lorraine hasn’t felt this good in years.


End file.
